


The Ghosts of Who Could Have Been

by KupoWonders



Category: Kingdom Hearts
Genre: Angst, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Nightmares, Post-Kingdom Hearts III, Replicas, Twilight Town Family, identity crisis
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-18
Updated: 2019-08-18
Packaged: 2020-09-06 21:18:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,612
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20298097
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KupoWonders/pseuds/KupoWonders
Summary: Xion struggles with her new existence, as a replica inside another replica's body.





	The Ghosts of Who Could Have Been

**Author's Note:**

> Because wouldn't it be a little strange, for a replica to become another replica?

Hands were reaching out for her, grabbing at her clothes, her skin, her hair. They felt real, but at the same time not – like phantom limbs that could still do harm, despite their nonexistence. Everything around her was white, so blindingly white that she could barely make out anything outside her own body, but with every hand grabbing and clawing at her, her body seemed to disappear. Every handful of hair the phantoms seized faded away, every place on her arms they touched disintegrated. She was fading into pale shards, fading into nothingness.

Faces that weren’t faces at all, had none of the features that made up a face like eyes or mouths, were staring at her, and even though they had no mouths she could hear their screaming. Their voices were hollow, hardly voices at all, but they echoed in her head nevertheless and instinctively, she knew that they sounded like her. 

_“Give it back!”_

_“You had your chance!”_

_“Let us live!”_

Xion was startled awake, sitting up in her bed with a hand flying to her chest. The strange, new complete heart was racing inside her, a frantic beat pounding away in her chest, terrified but strong and _alive_.

For an instant, she wished it was gone. 

“Xion?” 

Roxas’s voice, still slurred with sleep, reached her, and she glanced over to where he was lying on the other side of the room. One arm was hanging over the side of his bed, reaching out for her, and if it was the usual nightmares she would have gone over to him like she usually did. They’d had separate rooms at first, right next door to one another like they had been in the Castle, but after the nightmares and the lingering fear that the other had faded away in the moments they were apart, they decided that shoving two beds into one room of their Twilight Town house was a good solution. She’d moved into Roxas’s room, her few possessions fitting easily into the messy room he had practically copied from Data Twilight Town, and for a while, the nightmares had eased. At least the nightmares that involved the two of them fighting each other, killing each other, or fighting and killing Axel and Saïx, anyway. 

But looking at Roxas now, the boy who was her best friend, who had always been there for her, in a body that was his but wasn’t, just made everything worse. 

She pushed herself out of bed, stumbling out of the room and towards the balcony of their house, needing the fresh air. Twilight was still pouring in through the sheer curtains covering the balcony doors – night never truly fell here, a sliver of the sun always visible on the horizon, even as the sky darkened to deep purple that was almost the colour of the dark corridors she had used to travel worlds. Now her world was just this one, aside from her weekly trips to Radiant Garden and her infrequent ones to Destiny Islands, the Land of Departure and Disney Castle, she had no need to use the corridors anymore, but the familiar colours were almost comforting. 

Her heartbeat – and wasn’t that strange to know, that the occasional pounding in her chest was evidence of the heart she had always been told she didn’t have – was beginning to slow as she stepped out onto the cold stone of the balcony, clutching at the railings a little too tightly. She looked over the other houses in the street, at the occasional glowing window in the otherwise dark neighbourhood, and she wondered how these other people felt. These real people, in their real houses, who had never had to wonder if they really existed and if they had any right to, who never had to wonder if their life was a result of stealing life from someone else, even if she had never wanted or asked for it-

She could hear footsteps slowly padding over to her, and while in the past that would have led her to swing around with weapon in hand, she forced herself not to react as Roxas made his way over to stand beside her on the balcony. There was enough room for the two of them to stand comfortably, without touching one another, but Roxas had placed himself right next to her, so close that if she relaxed a little their arms would touch. She didn’t relax. 

“Xion?” he repeated. “What’s wrong?"

“It’s nothing,” she replied, the lie a reflex at this point. “I’m fine.”

Roxas was quiet, and she saw him rock back a little beside her, the waning light tangling in his golden hair and catching in his eyes. 

“We promised we’d be honest with each other,” he reminded her, and his voice was so quiet and hesitant, like he didn’t want to make her feel guilty about all the lies that had filled their last few months in the Organisation, that shame began to eat at her. She looked down, away from the city, and bit her lip. She did want to be honest, but how could she even begin to approach this?

“Roxas...” she began, slowly, “what does… what does it feel like?”

“Having a heart?” he asked, without thinking, and Xion shook her head. 

“Having a body,” she clarified, and quickly corrected herself. “Having a _replica’s_ body.”

Roxas paused, glancing down at himself before giving a confused shrug. “It… it’s a lot like having my old body. Sora’s body, I guess.” He glanced over to her, familiar concern in his face. “Is it different for you?”

She was about to shake her head, but she hesitated. They had to be honest with each other.

“Yes,” she said. “But it’s not bad,” she assured him as he tensed. “It’s… it’s like the bad parts are gone. The parts that weren’t me, but _were_ me, back when I was in the Organisation.” She glanced over to him, to see if she was making more sense than she thought she was, but Roxas looked lost. She took a deep breath and continued. “You have to understand, when Saïx called me broken-”

“He was wrong,” Roxas said immediately, eyes going hard and determined like they always did when someone called her wrong or broken or incomplete, and she felt a sudden, fierce affection for this boy that almost derailed her train of thought completely. 

“He wasn’t,” she replied, but she tried to keep her voice nonchalant. The words were in the past, they barely stung now, and she didn’t want him to spend all day tomorrow glaring at Isa because she’d brought this up. “Look at you, Roxas. Look at me now. We’re whole – no one looks at you and just sees Sora, or Riku, or- or an empty face.” She faltered a little at that, something funny happening in her eyes and throat, and she had to take a moment to breathe before she continued. “You’re even different enough from Ven that only strangers can confuse the two of you. But I… I was unstable. For my entire life I was unstable, I had no real face-”

“You always had a face to me,” Roxas pointed out, and she bit her lip. 

“The point is, I wasn’t even a good replica back then,” she said. “I was supposed to be a perfect copy, but I wasn’t. I was absorbing you, but I was still myself, and even though my purpose was to be Sora, I couldn’t do that right either. And I was good enough to be in the Organisation, to be the one they kept, the one they used. And I faded away, I stopped existing and disappeared, my real body is gone, and now… and now they’ve given me a replica.” She placed a shaking hand over her heart. “Somehow, they got the heart I never should have had and put it in a replica. I should be an empty vessel, I should be the shell, but I’m here in the body of someone who could… who could have been my sister.” 

Tears were falling freely now, and Roxas had turned so that he was facing her and had wrapped an arm around her shoulders, glancing back into the dark house as if waiting for Axel or Isa to appear and help. She knew she should stop, she was upsetting him, but she couldn’t.

“Why? What makes me so special that I’m the one who gets to live, and they don’t? What about the replica that I’ve taken over? What if they could have grown a heart too, and I took that away from them? What if someone had already started talking to them, they’d already started to live, and then I stole all that away? What if there’s someone inside me like I was inside Sora, and no one knows they’re there? No one knows their name, who they could have been, and what gives me the right to take that away from them?”

“Xion,” Roxas said, but his voice was lost and haunted like he didn’t know what to say, and that just made the tears come stronger. 

“The new replica program was not like the old one,” a quiet, matter-of-fact voice said from behind them, and Xion still couldn’t quite stop the instinctual urge to tense and hide weakness from the voice’s owner. “They were not designed to grow individuality. They were little more than dolls.”

“Neither was I!” she argued, not even glancing past Roxas’s comforting presence to meet Isa’s gaze. Even though his eyes were green now, not gold, they still seemed to burn now that she knew they were on her. “You told me yourself – I wasn’t supposed to exist. I was never supposed to be Xion, I was supposed to be Sora. This body is supposed to be Xion, but what if they were going to become someone else? If I stole that from them, if who they are, their personality, their dreams, is being… being _drowned_ in me, then I’m… then I’m a monster.” She shuddered. “I’m just as bad as Xehanort.”

There was an awful silence, broken only by Xion’s half-smothered sobs, before Roxas’s grip tightened a little, and he began to gently turn her and stoop slightly so that he looked in her face. (It was still strange to her how he’d much grown taller than her, when they had spent a year almost the same height – Axel and Isa still towered over them both, but even so-)

“You are not him,” he promised her, and his tone left no room whatsoever for arguments. “You didn’t take anything. You didn’t do anything wrong just by existing, Xion.”

Xion didn’t say anything, tears still falling, but out of the corner of her eye she could see Isa stepping fully out onto the balcony, and crouching down so that he was looking up at her. His face was solemn, but not the derisive mask that it had been in the year they had spent in the Organisation. She could barely remember her days as a Seeker, but she knew that the look he was giving her now was a lot more like the ones he had given her in the Graveyard, guilt and shame in eyes that he couldn’t quite hide from her. The light caught strangely on the ridges of his scar, and made him look a lot younger and older all at once, like the horrors he had endured far too young had aged him. 

“What did it feel like, to be in Sora’s heart?” he asked. There was no emotion in his voice, but then again there rarely was. 

“...Warm,” she answered after a moment. She had to clear her throat to speak properly. “Like lying in the sun, on a beach. Peaceful.”

“And to have Xehanort’s inside you?” 

Her nose scrunched up involuntarily, a shudder running through her. “Like darkness was choking me from the inside. Like everything bad I’ve ever felt was there all at once.” Roxas’s hand began to rub circles in her shoulder, earnest and comforting if a little awkward, and she finally let go of the handrail to place her hand over his. 

“Which do you think your heart feels like?” Isa asked her, not breaking eye contact for a moment. “A patch of sun, warming yourself and others, or a dark chasm, amplifying everything you hate most about yourself?”

Xion didn’t respond, but she didn’t need to. The minute the question was asked, she didn’t see the eternal night of the World That Never Was, or the sickly glow of the fake Kingdom Hearts – she saw the last sunset before she had ran away one final time, the first sunset in her new, stolen body, surrounded by old and new friends and filled with so much love that she felt like she was glowing, that every atom in her body was shining and singing and whole and _alive_. She didn’t think of the fear and shame and hate filling her when she had pointed her blade at the friend who had promised to save her in the Graveyard, but how safe she had felt when they had their arms around her, and her arms around them. The tears felt different, now, but still fell, and Isa gave her a tiny, barely there ghost of a smile. 

“If there is the echoes of another person inside you, they’ll be in your heart,” Isa told her. “I do not believe they will be suffering there. And if there is no one there but you, then you have nothing to fear.”

Xion watched him, at the man who had been strangled by another’s heart, having all of his weaknesses amplified and called his strength, and she wiped at her eyes with her free hand. 

“I just don’t want to hurt anyone anymore,” she whispered, and he nodded like he understood. Maybe he did. 

“You aren’t going to, Xion.”

He kept crouching there, looking up at her, until finally her tears began to slow, and the sun that was sitting on the horizon began to rise again, bathing the world in a brighter twilight. 

“It’ll all be okay,” Roxas said quietly, and as she looked up at him she didn’t see the ghostly faces of who could have existed in their place. She just saw the sweet, concerned face of her best friend, the boy who wouldn’t have been here if a replica hadn’t given him the chance to live again and finally have the life he’d always dreamed of. Maybe that’s what he saw when he looked at her, too. 

Maybe the guilt wouldn’t really go away. But at least she could try to be a warm heart, a comforting clock tower at twilight surrounded by friends if not quite a radiant seaside. She could keep them warm, if they were there. 

“Yeah,” she said softly. “Maybe it will be.”

Roxas smiled then, a gentle, comforting smile, and Isa straightened up again. 

“Let’s go inside, then. Lea will be complaining of the cold in a moment.”

“I can’t believe he didn’t wake up,” Roxas commented, keeping his arm around Xion as he began to walk back into the house. 

“You didn’t know him as a teenager. He’s always needed three alarms to give him motivation to move.”

Xion laughed a little at that, and Roxas demanded to know what the worst way to wake Axel up was for definitely innocent reasons, while Isa may have cracked an actual, genuine smile for a split second before he hid it again, and she felt a little lighter than before. A little warmer, too.


End file.
